The Sahrawi refugee camps, located in southern Algeria close to the border with the Western Sahara, give us an opportunity to question the predominant notions connected to refugee camps. This article builds up an urbanistic and architectural reading of these camps—established more than 35 years ago in the middle of the Sahara—and shows how these spaces have developed into a political project of the refugees. Instead of seeing the camps as a spatial manifestation of the state of exception, this article analyzes the Sahrawi camps through the everyday activities taking place there, showing their political and strategic dimensions. The camps, governed by the refugees themselves, not only allow for a process of social emancipation, but they also prefigure the state still denied them.
Plemmons and Albro examine anthropological research practice and ethics, in the context of the expanding security regime in the U.S. With particular attention to the perceived value of disciplinary methods and expertise for emerging military humanitarian interventions, for which sociocultural knowledge is deemed crucial, they consider a long-standing disciplinary anxiety about “secret and clandestine” work for the security state. Exploring how anthropological knowledge is fundamentally co-produced with counterparts “in the field,” they emphasize the irreducibility of secrecy as part of research relationships. The article also seeks to sharpen appreciation for ethics as a negotiated feature of disciplinary practice.
This article considers the various possibilities for citizenship that can be imagined given our highly visual world. An interview with Fred Ritchin, New York University professor and author of After Photography, explores this issue through discussing how the circulation and dissemination of visual imagery may open avenues for dialogue, participation, communication, and understanding. Ritchin draws upon his extensive experience as an editor, curator, and educator to expand on several ideas: the circulation of images of suffering, the boundary between photography and art, and ethical responses engendered as part of a global citizenry.
The authors argue that looking at the gendering of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan provides insight into the assumptions, strategies, and anxieties about U.S. involvement in this particular war. One sees in the gendering of counterinsurgency, exemplified most strikingly in the deployment of female engagement teams, an attempt to reframe U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan as a humanitarian, even progressive, mission. Gendering counterinsurgency efforts as a gentler (feminine) option helps to sell the current campaign to a war-weary audience in the U.S. (and allied countries). It is also a way of marking U.S. civilizational superiority—and the attention lavished upon women soldiers deployed in Afghanistan is a significant aspect of this gendered narrative.
This suite of images is drawn from photos published by the U.S. military and military personnel to publicize the community-building, reconstruction, and social welfare projects it has supported in Afghanistan and Iraq, including school programs, medical care, and village-development projects involving women and children. Showcasing the range of current military-led humanitarian efforts taking place within active combat theaters, these photos were taken by ordinary servicemen and servicewomen in the course of duty. Except for one image from a separate source, their publication has been approved by public affairs officers and represents part of the American military's evolving counterinsurgency-related "information operations." Justine Pak played an essential role in organizing this photo essay for the journal.
An investigation of counterinsurgency as a hybrid model of warfare that enacts targeted killing while supporting the life of the population. Useful to this dual objective are metaphors of infectious disease in the body to characterize the problem of insurgency within a population. Bell first examines how cultural awareness programming is designed to create versatile soldiers who can inflict death while also supporting life. Her discussion then turns to how metaphors of disease, treatment and immunity are posed as efforts to save and strengthen the (social) body alongside the task of defeating insurgency, elucidating the close proximity posited between life and death in hybrid warfare. The paradigm of immunity, as theorized by Roberto Esposito, captures not only this duality between life and death but connects it to the powerful desire to protect self from “other.” Hybrid warfare draws upon the authority and apparent benevolence of medical metaphors to clarify and render urgent the long-term, socially corrective intervention that it proscribes. It lays bare and deepens distinctions between forms of life in global relations and fails to take seriously the opposition encountered.
Download PDF England’s blasphemy laws were abolished by an act of Parliament on May 8, 2008. This occurred with remarkably little fanfare, although not before a major parliamentary inquiry in 2002–3 and, prior to that, an attempt by a Muslim man (Mr. Choudhury) to launch a prosecution against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1990, on the grounds that it blasphemed against the Islamic religion.1 Interpretations of these developments have been strikingly different. Some commentators have viewed them as symptoms of the last gasps of a law whose
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This essay provides a historical contextualization of the Universal Declaration’s statement on religious liberty. It suggests that its main components—the stress on the inner dimensions of conscience and belief, as well as the right to change one’s religion—reflected very particular political and intellectual currents in the postwar moment. Article 18 was not the product of an abstract overlapping consensus; instead, it marked a victory for some actors to whom the details of this statement mattered. In this respect, this essay highlights the influence of Charles Malik and the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs. What these actors did in the context of writing the UDHR was essentially to recast international religious liberty as primarily concerned with the formation of the individual person’s beliefs, rather than the “free exercise” of religion.
Recent human rights and rule of law initiatives pursued by both national governments and international institutions are part of a continent-wide project of liberal reform that has altered the landscape of law and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa. The central questions motivating this article are twofold: how have societal and legal categories of crime changed in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last twenty years, and what role has been played by national institutions such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and international tribunals such as the International Criminal Court? Since this article aspires to say something about both the law and popular discourse on crime, it reviews legal decisions as well as African literature and film.
This essay-review revisits political theorist Judith Shklar’s classic Legalism, with an eye to the uses of its arguments in the era of the International Criminal Court. After reviewing her jurisprudence, the essay takes up her defense of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, showing that it is mainly her critical arguments about international criminal law that survive today. Then the essay goes on to examine further features of her doctrines, including the implications of her engagement with the so-called Tokyo trial for Japanese war criminals for the typically postcolonial setting of international criminal law today.
